MIght a new American civil war break out – irrespective of who wins on Novmeber 5, 2024? Guess who's the wild card? What the Orange Jesus himeself, Donald John Trump

Over the years I have joked about my age, pretending to be over 90 or even over 100. Were someone else to do that, this cynic would suggest it was essentially some kind of rather sad displacement measure by someone who was not quite as happy about growing older as he or she (but more probably he) might care to admit. However, here I shall come clean.

In twenty days, on November 21, I shall turn 75. But as this blog entry is not about me and shall explain why I mention my age: in my 75 years – or better about 60 as like most people did was not much aware of the wider world until I was in my early teens – I have seen many changes and heard about many more which occurred before I was born.

Over those years I also became accustomed to the standard media hyperbole which assures us that this gadget / this event / this revolutionary loo roll / this new leader in Somewhere or Other / this groundbreaking new law / this new what-fuck-ever is ‘probably the most significant in the past fifty years. And, of course, it was and is not, not by a long chalk.

I’m a great believer in the French notion of plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose or as Prince Tancredi had it in Tomasi di Lampedusa novel The Leopard Everything must change for everything to remain the same. That last doesn’t quite imply the same thing, but it is related.

So pretty much in for us pampered paps in the Western World, pretty much everything has remained the same, despite ‘changes’.

I have lived through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Nixon Watergate scandal – which, by the way, I’m now beginning to believe was by far not quite what it seemed to be and that, ironically, Tricky Dicky himself might have been taken for a ride – and much else.

Then there was more than thirty years ago the collapse of the Soviet Union and its attendant satellite client states, the evolution of the internet and so on. You get the picture.

Certainly, many of these developments seemed significant at the time but in retrospect – and as we have become more accustomed to a new dimension to reality as in ‘going online’ and using a mobile / cell phone is now standard for pretty much all of us – that ‘significance’ has somewhat faded and much ‘remained the same’.

Over the past two centuries, however, there has been much which has not just remained the same, but which few saw coming or even suspected was on the horizon. One example might be the First World War or as was at the time The Great War, so-called because no one expected another ‘great war’ to follow on its heels just over twenty years later.

And, I suggest, the coming US presidential election next Tuesday, November 2024, might prove to be an exception to the rule that all ‘significant’ changes become less significant as time passes. Could America slowly then quite quickly fall into civil war? And outlandish suggestion, of course: don’t be so bloody mad, you lunatic – of course not! And I agree (but . . .)

. . .

The choice America faces in four days is between electing former President Donald Trump and the current US Vice-president Kamala Harris as its new president. Trump is – I have to say nominally – ‘a Republican’ and is standing for the Republican party (or what is left of it now). Harris a Democrat. According to ‘the polls’, the candidates are neck-and-neck and frankly who will be inaugurated in January next is anyone’s guess.

In my 75 years there have been sixteen presidential elections and the first I was aware of was the campaign fought between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when I was almost ten years aold. All US presidential elections have been fought hard and dirty and each side of the battle has predicted dire consequences if its man (and in 2016 woman, Hillary Clinton, its woman) was not elected. But this 2024 election is in a different league entirely, in many ways.

For one thing in the 2020 election between the then incumbent president Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s VP when Obama was in the White House, had very curious outcome: Biden won by a tiny margin in that he won the votes of the most delegates to the electoral college, although Trump won more voes nationally.

But that isn’t what was notable (and by 2020 is was not unique, either). What distinguished that election from every preceding US election was that Trump point-blank refused to accept the result.

Instead he declared that ‘the election had been stolen’ and that there had been ‘widespread voter fraud’ which had rigged the result against him.

This was unprecedented: despite previous electoral confusion, notably in the fight between George W Bush and Al Gore in 2020, one of the closest in American history when the issue of contention was whether votes in Florida which had fallen foul of a mechanical voting machine (the ‘hanging chads’ controversy) but also allegations that some votes intended for Gore were misdirected to a third candidate.

In the event the issue went to the Supreme Court which considered the various issues involced and decided 5-4 that Bush had won the election, even though Gore had, nationally, won more of the popular vote. And Gore graciously accepted the decision. ‘Grace’ is certainly not a trait in the Trump personality make-up.

. . .

I shan’t get into the US Electoral College system, but frankly it is now wholly outdated and has in recent years has caused ever more problems and is in dire need of reform. But given how it came about and evolved and the deep-seated political antagonisms which have riven the US such reform is less likely than the Pope entering into a civil partnership with one of his cardinals. So like it or not America is still obliged to live with its inane nature.

Who gets how many Electoral College votes is crucial. Each state is allocated as many Electoral College votes as it has senators. And even more crucial is that about five or six so-called ‘swing states’ and who is awarded their electoral college votes determines who will enter the White House.

Some states are either solid Republican or Democrat, but the ‘swing states’ to and fro, their ultimate result depending on the outcome of the vote in just three or four of of their counties.

Traditionally, and however bitter an election campaign was fought, at some point the losing candidate will ring his opponent and concede. This did not happen in 2020.

As I point out the crux of the danger here – and if you accept my outrageous suggestion that if things get really bad, the US could find itself in a civil war – Trump simply does not play by the rules. This, too, was unprecedented, but it got even worse.

Here I should declare my partisanship: I think Donald Trump is a nine-dollar bill to whom I would not even give the time of day. The man is what we Brits call ‘a toe-rag’. He has been convicted of fraud and in a separate fraud case has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in ‘disgorgement’. He has been adjudged guilty of rape by ‘finger-fucking’ a woman in a department store changing room, and in my book he is not only a crook but a despicable human being.

Others in the US reading this might well take the opposite view, and I accept that they entitled to it. Others still might even agree with me about Trump’s very dodgy character and morals, but, for a number of reasons, not least issues on which the 2024 election is being fought, they might still choose to vote for him not Harris because he is the Republican candidate.

And whether or not Trump is elected the US’s 47th president and what it’s consequences might be is what this blog entry is all about: from where I stand a new Trump presidency would be a disaster, not just for the US but for much of the world given the economic role the US economy plays in global affairs. Trump strikes me as a man who understands as much about economics as I do Han Chinese, which is nothing at all.

. . .

The 50 odd days after the 202o election were frankly very unsettling and confusing, not least because despite America’s smug boast of being ‘the leader of the free world’ it did not know how to deal with development. Then there was the problem that Trump’s behaviour was downright bizarre, and none of it in a good way.

Even before the November 2020 election, perhaps suspecting he might lose or simply as a precaution, he began insisting that if he did not win, it could only be because of fraud by the authorities. Pertinently, he never specified which authorities, just the ‘they are were to get him’.

In that way he was already – and not so subtly – laying the ground for what in the event became his post-election strategy: that fraud lay behind Biden’s victory and that he election was stolen from him.

He did not produce any solid evidence at all, and what ‘evidence’ he did produce was investigated and dismissed by the courts. All 60-odd cases he brought before the courts were dismissed, every last one of them.

But curiously that did not matter: his cry that the election was stolen was enthusiastically taken up by his supporters, and when he made a metaphorical call to arms to congregate in Washington to ‘stop the steal, several thousand turned up, their ‘protest’ got out of hand and they smashed their way in to Congress to attempt to delay certification of the election result by VP Mike Pence.

Shamefully, yet again ‘the leader of the free world’ was had no idea as to how to handle it and in practice did fuck-all.

All this has been well-documented, and it is redundant to repeat chapter and verse here. What is pertinent is that Trump is once again insisting that if he is not elected next Tuesday, it can only be because of fraud and that the election had been rigged. Yet it gets even worse.

Trump has repeatedly been asked to confirm that he will acknowledge the result of the election, and he has repeatedly refused to do so. This is unprecedented – as far as I know – in US history and worryingly America seems paralysed by Trump’s tactics and strategy: they do not know what to do. To be blunt, they are clueless.

This is where – whatever the outcome of the election – America could find itself in a dire constitutional crisis, and despite the outlandish theme of what I write, it would be better if I were completely wrong than that there should be any traction at all in what I suggets.

The Republican dominated US Supreme Court has already ruled that a US president would be immune from criminal prosecution for any ‘presidential’ acts and decisions.

In the legal preamble to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the question was broached – in all seriousness – as to whether the US President would be liable for criminal prosecution if he ordered the assassination – for which, let’s again be blunt, read ‘murder’ – of a political opponent. The answer seemed to be ‘no, he would not, he would have immunity’.

In that one Supreme Court decision America degenerated in an instant from the – supposed – fount of all democracy to the status of a totalitarian state. So far the court’s decision has not had to be tested. If Trump’s becomes the 47th president, he will have criminal immunity for ‘presidential acts’.

At that point all the subseqent arguing about what might be, or better have been, a ‘presidential act’ would be crucial but de facto redundant. We have seen in the past, in 1930s Germany and later elsewhere and most recently in Viktor Orban’s Hungary how democratic institutions and their attendant support structures – a free media and an independent judiciary – can every swiftly be neutralised then demolished unless they are constantly sustained.

One might argue as some do that Trump and his backers have already destroyed the neutrality of the Supreme Court. The only sanction the legislature and thus ‘the people’ have over the Supreme Court is financial: funds could be stopped.

But however ‘serious’ in theory, that is no sanction whatsoever in practice. Like it or not, rather too many pieces are now in place for Trump – and I’ll repeat ‘his backers’, because I think they are the brains behind all this, not Trump – to behave dictatorially.

. . .

The outcome of the 2024 can be only one of two possibilities: eventually either Trump or Harris is inaugurated as the US’s 47th President.

If Trump is ruled to have lost, it is more than likely that he will simply again refuse to accept the result and again call on his supporters to ‘rise up’. He is already reported to laying his plans to cry foul if he loses.

And judging by the response on January 6, 2021, thousands will respond. And what happens then?

If, on the other hand, Trump is eventually declared to have won the election, he will be free to act precisely as he likes.

Here we should remind ourselves that the number of military personnel, law agents and police who might have voted for Trump will be unknown. Of these many might feel as did General Mark Milley that his loyalty is to the US constitution not to the president, in this case Trump.

Others might not agree and when, say, called upon by Trump not to oppose any violent actions by his supporters, they might well decide that their loyalty is to the man they voted for. We simply do not know. Furthermore such a scenario has never been tested.

If Trump wins, what might be the reaction of the losers? We should remind ourselves that gun ownership is as widespread among those who identify as Democrats as Republicans. Will they peacefully accept the transfer of power to Trump?

Or might they declare that what was sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander and themselves now join the protests, many of which could turn violent?

If those protests did turn violent and if – as Trump has suggested he would be entitled to do and as he would not shy away from doing – he called on the US Army to repress them and those being repressed then shot back, it would all get seriously out of hand, and a new civil war could not be ruled out.

That is, of course, fanciful, but what is not fanciful is that the likelihood can be completely ruled out.

And American friend of mine, rather bemused by my then patchier knowledge of the US, once advised me, broadly, to view the 50 US states as ‘different countries’. They are, of course, not different countries: what he meant was that they all have their own traditions, often their own version of particular laws, their distinct cultures and so on.

It is this, for example, how jealously the different states guard their difference, which would be one of the many stumbling blocks in any attempt to reform the electoral colleges system.

So we might ask: do all the inhabitants of each unique state feel loyalty more to their state than the union? Or is it the other way round?

What if a staunchly ‘liberal’ as in Democrat state – California, say – felt it had been outplayed, especially given what it regarded as the partisan nature of the Supreme Court, and decided slowly to loosen its federal ties. What if a now powerful Trump administration retaliated by declaring martial law in that state? What if then the national guard of that state took up arms again the federal forces?

One so far accepted law is that in extremis federal law is always superior to state law. What if a state declared it now longer intended abiding by that agreement?

OK, we could carry on the ‘what ifs’ till kingdom come, but the point is that given the pronouncements, the publicly declared intentions by Donald Trump and the, it seems, real hatred between the MAGA republicans and the Democrats, such what ifs are not longer quite as fanciful.

. . .

Russia will be hoping for a Trump victory given his vow to withdraw military support and funding from Ukraine, and it seems Putin is getting a tad desperate.

The conventional wisdom holds, is more hopeful that Harris will prevail: for trade reasons it would far prefer a calm relationship with the US, steady as you go, despite the sanctions imposed by Biden, and given Trump’s wacky promise to impose severe sanctions on all US imports (although not just Chinese, it seems China would rather not have Trump as prezzy thank you very much.